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who takes the love you’ve been given and spews it out stronger than before, but with none of yourself attached to it. You are not whole.
    He came to where Esste sat, and sat beside her. It was his right, since she was his master. She said no words, but only sighed in a way that said to Ansset’s sensitive ears, “Fair, but flawed.” The unexpected and undeserved criticism did not cause his expression to change. He only answered with a grunt that meant, “You hardly needed to tell me , I knew it.”
    Control, thought Esste. You have certainly learned Control.

 

8

     
    Ansset did not sing again for an audience in the Songhouse. At first he did not notice it. It was simply not his turn to solo or duo or trio or quarto in Chamber. But when everyone in his chamber had performed twice or three times, and Ansset had not been asked to sing, he became puzzled, then alarmed. He did not ask because volunteering simply was not done. He waited. And waited. And his turn never seemed to come.
    It was not long after he noticed it that the others in Chamber began commenting on it, first to each other, finally to Ansset. “Did you do something wrong?” they asked him, one by one at mealtime or in the corridors or in the toilet. “Why are you being punished?”
    Ansset only answered with a shrug or a sound that said, How should I know? But when his ban from performing continued, he began to turn away the questions with coldness that taught the questioner quickly that the subject was forbidden. It was part of Control for Ansset, not to let himself become part of speculation about this mysterious ban. Nor would his Control allow him to ask. Esste could continue as long as she liked. Whatever it meant, whatever she hoped to accomplish, Ansset would bear it unquestioning.
    She came to his stall every day, of course, just as before. Being Songmaster in the High Room meant additional duties, not relief from her previous ones. Finding and training Mikal’s Songbird was her life’s work, chosen freely decades ago. It would not end, the burden would not be lifted, just because Nniv died and that damned fool Kya-Kya had had the temerity to afflict her with his office. She said as much to Ansset, hoping to reassure him that he would not be losing her. But he took the news without any sign that he cared either way, and went on with the day’s lessons as if nothing were wrong.
    And why should he do anything else? Until Kya-Kya had said her say just before leaving, Esste had not worried particularly. If Ansset was superb at Control, he was superb at everything else, too, and so it was not to be remarked upon. But now Esste noticed the Control as if each example of Ansset’s apparent unconcern were a blow to her.
    As for Ansset, he had no idea what was going on inside Esste’s mind. For Esste’s Control was also superb, and she showed nothing of her worry or reasoning to Ansset. That was as it should be, Ansset assumed. I am a lake, he thought, and all my walls are high. I have no low place. I grow deeper every day.
    It did not occur to him that he might drown.

 

9

     
    A lesson.
    Esste took Ansset to a bare room with no windows. Just stone, a dozen meters square, and a thick door that admitted no sound. They sat on the stone floor, and because all the floors were stone, they found the floor comfortable, or at least familiar, and Ansset was able to relax.
    “Sing,” said Esste, and Ansset sang. As always, his body was rigid and his face showed no emotion; as always, the song was intensely emotional. This time he sang of darkness and closed-in spaces, and he sounded mournful. Esste was often surprised by the depth of Ansset’s understanding of things he surely, at his age, could not know firsthand.
    The song resonated and echoed back from the walls.
    “It rings,” Esste said.
    “Mmmm,” Ansset answered.
    “Sing so it doesn’t ring.”
    Ansset sang again, this time a wordless and essentially meaningless song that danced easily